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US Foreign Policy 3.0: We're The Mets of International Diplomacy

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I was thinking about this on my drive home. Im so fucking glad wellstone wasn't here to see this. He was so violently right on everything.
 
https://twitter.com/CraigMWhitlock/s...42702014402561

The Pentagon promised 10 years ago it had straightened out the Afghan security forces. “They only continue to get better with time,” General Caldwell said. It was all nonsense.
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Apparently "The Afghanistan Papers" is quite the read...

From the article in the tweet:

The capitulation was sped up by a series of secret deals that the Taliban brokered with many Afghan government officials. In recent days and weeks, Taliban leaders used a combination of cash, threats and promises of leniency to persuade government forces to lay down their arms.

Although U.S. intelligence officials had recently forecast the possible demise of the Afghan government over the next three to six months, the Biden administration was caught unprepared by the velocity of the Taliban takeover. Afghan forces “proved incapable of defending the country. And that did happen more rapidly than we anticipated,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday on the ABC News program “This Week.”

Over two decades, the U.S. government invested more than $85 billion to train and equip the Afghans and pay their salaries. Today, all that’s left is arsenals of weapons, ammunition and supplies that have fallen into the hands of the enemy.

Senior U.S. officials said the Pentagon fell victim to the conceit that it could build from scratch an enormous Afghan army and police force with 350,000 personnel that was modeled on the centralized command structures and complex bureaucracy of the Defense Department. Though it was obvious from the beginning that the Afghans were struggling to make the U.S.-designed system work, the Pentagon kept throwing money at the problem and assigning new generals to find a solution.

“We kept changing guys who were in charge of training the Afghan forces, and every time a new guy came in, he changed the way that they were being trained,” Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary during the Bush and Obama administrations, said in an oral-history interview with scholars at the University of Virginia. “The one thing they all had in common was they were all trying to train a Western army instead of figuring out the strengths of the Afghans as a fighting people and then building on that.”
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Maj. Greg Escobar, a U.S. Army infantry officer, spent 2011 trying to straighten out a dysfunctional Afghan army unit in Paktika province near the border with Pakistan. The first Afghan battalion commander whom Escobar mentored lost his job after he was charged with raping one of his male soldiers. The commander’s replacement, in turn, was killed by his own men.

Escobar said he came to realize that the whole exercise was futile because the U.S. military was pushing too fast and the Afghans were not responding to what was, in the end, a foreign experiment. “Nothing we do is going to help,” he recalled in an Army oral-history interview. “Until the Afghan government can positively affect the people there, we’re wasting our time.”

Other Army officers who trained the Afghans recounted scenes of mayhem that boded poorly for how they would perform on the battlefield. Maj. Mark Glaspell, an Army engineer with the 101st Airborne Division who served as a mentor to Afghan forces from 2010 to 2011, said even simple exercises went haywire.

Glaspell recalled trying to teach an Afghan platoon in the eastern city of Gardez how to exit a CH-47 Chinook, a heavy-lift helicopter used to transport troops and supplies. They lacked an actual Chinook to practice on, so he lined up rows of folding chairs instead and instructed the Afghans how to safely disembark.

“We were working on that and it was going pretty good and all of a sudden this Afghan soldier walks up and he and one of the guys in the class started to get into an argument,” Glaspell said in an Army oral-history interview. A third Afghan soldier then picked up a folding chair and pounded the first guy over the head, he said.

“Well, then it was a brawl; it was on,” Glaspell added. He let the Afghans duke it out until they got tired. “My interpreter actually looked at me, shook his head and said, ‘This is why we’ll never be successful,’ and he walked away.”
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But perhaps the biggest hardship was having to teach virtually every recruit how to read. Kem estimated that only 2 to 5 percent of Afghan recruits could read at a third-grade level despite efforts by the United States to enroll millions of Afghan children in school over the previous decade.

“The literacy was just insurmountable,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. Some Afghans also had to learn their colors, or had to be taught how to count. “I mean, you’d ask an Afghan soldier how many brothers and sisters they had and they couldn’t tell you it was four. They could tell you their names, but they couldn’t go ‘one, two, three, four.’ ”

Making everything harder was the Obama administration’s decision to rapidly expand the size of the Afghan security forces from 200,000 soldiers and police officers to 350,000. With recruits at a premium, Afghans were rushed through boot camp, even if they couldn’t shoot or perform other basic tasks.

In Washington, some skeptics warned Obama administration officials that they were sacrificing quality for quantity. But leaders at the Pentagon dismissed the concerns and insisted they could have both.
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No matter who is in the WH never trust the fucking Pentagon.
 
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Did you all know that the Taliban have 229 Christian missionaries and are going to behead them? It must be true if it's on Nextdoor.
 
French Rage said:
Did you all know that the Taliban have 229 Christian missionaries and are going to behead them? It must be true if it's on Nextdoor.
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Well...if they have them, there's not much doubt in my mind that beheading would be exactly their plan. I had a very good friend who did Christian missionary work (using his botany degree to go under cover as an agricultural consultant) there in the 90s. He only gave a very select few people his address over there, along with 2 pages of instructions for what not to put in any letters that we sent, making it very clear that mistakes could cost him his life. Nutsiest part is that he took his wife and 3 kids over there with him - they did make it back safely just a year or two before 9/11, thankfully.
 
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LynahFan said:
Well...if they have them, there's not much doubt in my mind that beheading would be exactly their plan. I had a very good friend who did Christian missionary work (using his botany degree to go under cover as an agricultural consultant) there in the 90s. He only gave a very select few people his address over there, along with 2 pages of instructions for what not to put in any letters that we sent, making it very clear that mistakes could cost him his life. Nutsiest part is that he took his wife and 3 kids over there with him - they did make it back safely just a year or two before 9/11, thankfully.
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That's a clear sign of brain damage
 
LynahFan said:
Well...if they have them, there's not much doubt in my mind that beheading would be exactly their plan. I had a very good friend who did Christian missionary work (using his botany degree to go under cover as an agricultural consultant) there in the 90s. He only gave a very select few people his address over there, along with 2 pages of instructions for what not to put in any letters that we sent, making it very clear that mistakes could cost him his life. Nutsiest part is that he took his wife and 3 kids over there with him - they did make it back safely just a year or two before 9/11, thankfully.
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Your friend sounds like a moron.

But it reminds me of a story my wife told me about a Mormon family member who went on a missionary tour in the early 2000s to "bring them the word of Jesus." Where did he go?

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Figure 3:16. Yup.
 
Rambo III, The Living Daylighta, Spies Like Us.

What other pro Mujahideen films were there in the '80s and '90s?
 
unofan said:
2 was generic 80s action movie with lots of explosions.
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1 very different movie from 2-4, and then 5 was different still. They were very enjoyable as brainless action movies, and until 5 they each had a sort of ham-fisted moral to them. Not particularly jingoistic, to be honest, particularly part 2.

5 was really dumb.
 
Swansong said:
1 very different movie from 2-4, and then 5 was different still. They were very enjoyable as brainless action movies, and until 5 they each had a sort of ham-fisted moral to them. Not particularly jingoistic, to be honest, particularly part 2.

5 was really dumb.
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I didn't even realize they made 4 and 5. I stopped at 3.

Yeah, 2 was only jingoistic to the extent he killed a bunch of commies. The underlying plot of being pissed at the US government/MIC kept it from going full rah rah.
 
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